CADRE Comments

So, last night I got to be sexually violated in absolutely unspeakable ways. Fortunately, I was only dreaming. I have stress dreams which often turn nightmarish, eight to ten hours every night -- for about forty years now. I can wake up and deal with whatever I was dealt with living and maybe dying through the night before. I've had a lot of practice. But for very many people in the world today, and for vastly many more throughout all history, that living hell isn't a dream they can wake up from. It happens in their waking life (and also, I suppose, in their dreams). Maybe all their lives, for years or months or weeks or days, or decades, until they die. Christmas is for them, of course -- although when I say "of course", let me pause a moment to give cultural context: here in modern Western Civilization we might easily think "of course, whatever good Christmas means, it must be for victims of the worst injustice". But that expectation is a result of C...

J. Warner Wallace (the popular "Cold-Case Christianity" apologist, who converted from atheism pretty late in his life), put out a Christmas post a few days ago: "Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God" , which among other things serves as a quick link gathering to prior articles of his on how the Gospels report Jesus talking about himself (or about Himself, to put it in divine caps in English). Those are fine, although from a sceptical standpoint (as JWW is well aware, but not everything can be covered in a short internet post, or even in multi-volume tomes!) the more salient way to put it would be: "Even if the Gospel authors weren't, in various ways, just making up what Jesus said and did concerning himself, and those reports are accurate to that extent," which of course most sceptics are going to be highly sceptical about, JWW included once upon a time, "Christmas is Christmas because Jesus did a good enough job convincing enough p...

So I was catching up with the half-season finale of Season Two of The Flash this week (the modern hit on the CW network, not the 90s version), which was also the Christmas episode, and what to my wondering ears should appear but a character (Caitlin) tries to explain Christmas to someone (Jay) she thinks has never heard of it. "Oh! -- uh, well, it's this holiday we have where we cut down trees and sing songs to celebrate the birth of a baby two thousand years ago, but then the Romans killed him, so we give each other gifts..." Admittedly, a third character in the scene (Cisco) is making a face during this and as she runs out of any idea for Christmas he snarks, " That's your explanation?" But he leaves soon afterward, and Jay reveals he was joking, he knows what Christmas is, and let's just move on to the important thing which is Caitlin and Jay making googly eyes at one another. This is just the kind of reply we could expect from writers who, wh...